The Defects of Bodily Movement and How to Correct Them

138. Their defects of the bodily movements and how to correct them

All animals without reason lead their lives only through bodily movements. This is similar to those in us which our souls consent to.

However, not all bodily movements are good.

• Some are harmful even if they cause no Sadness or Joy at the outset.
• Some are beneficial, even if it is inconvenient at first.

These bodily movements can be good or bad.

• They almost always make that goodness or evil appear much greater and more important than they are.
• This causes us to seek the good and avoid the evil with more ardour and care than is appropriate.

Animals are often deceived by traps.

• In order to avoid small traps, they rush into greater ones.

Therefore, we must use experience and reason to distinguish between good and evil, and to know their true worth.

In this way, we will not mistake one for the other, and not to be led to anything to excess.

139. The use of the same Passions, insofar as they belong to the soul; and first on Love

Bodily movements make up only the lesser part of our selves.

This is why we should principally consider the Passions of the soul.

Of these, Love and Hate arise from knowledge and precede Joy and Sadness: except when these latter take the place of knowledge, of which they are species.

This knowledge is true when:

• the things that it leads us to love are truly good
• the things that it leads us to hate are truly bad.

Love is incomparably better than Hate.

• Love is extremely good, because by attaching us to true goods, it perfects us accordingly.

Love cannot be too great.

• The most extreme it can do is to attach us so perfectly to these goods that the self-love we particularly have for ourselves makes no distinction; which I believe can never be bad.

Love never fails to produce Joy.

• Love is necessarily followed by Joy because it represents to us what we love as a good that belongs to us.

140. Hatred

Hatred, on the other hand, cannot be so small that it does not harm, and it is never without Sadness.

This is because we are not incited to any action by hatred of evil, which we could not be better by the love of the good to which it is contrary; at least when this good and this evil are sufficiently known.

The hatred of evil is only revealed by pain.

This hatred is necessary with regard to the body.

• But this hatred is one that comes from a clearer knowledge, and I relate it only to the soul.

It is always with Sadness because evil is only a privation.

• Evil cannot be conceived without some real subject that is evil.

• Everything real has some goodness in itself.

And so that hatred which keeps us away from some evil, at the same time keeps us away from the good associated with it.

• The privation of this good excites Sadness.

For example, hatred might keep us away from someone’s bad habits.

• That hatred also keeps us away at the same time from his good company.
• We feel sad to be deprived of it.

Thus in all other hatreds, one can notice some cause of Sadness.